Prof Candida Yates
Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University. Candida Yates applies a psychosocial approach to culture, politics and society and has taught, supervised students and published widely in that field. She works with academics, clinicians, and cultural organisations to create new understandings of emotion and affect in the public sphere.
Email: cyates@bournemouth.ac.uk
Dr Jenny Alexander
Senior Lecturer in Politics, Media and Communication, Bournemouth University. Jenny Alexander writes on sustainability, climate and communication. She is interested in eco-psychology and environmental political thought.
Email: alexanderj@bournemouth.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 5: Policy and strategy
50. It’s the cost-of-living-crisis, stupid! (Prof Aeron Davis)
51. The last pre-war vote? Defence and foreign policy in the 2024 Election (Dr Russell Foster)
52. The 2024 UK general election and the absence of foreign policy (Dr Victoria Honeyman)
53. Fractious consensus: defence policy at the 2024 General Election (Dr Ben Jones)
54. The psycho-politics of climate denial in the 2024 UK election (Prof Candida Yates, Dr Jenny Alexander)
55. How will the Labour government fare and what should they do better? (Prof Rick Stafford and team)
56. Finding the environment: climate obstructionism and environmental movements on TikTok (Dr Abi Rhodes)
57. Irregular migration: ‘Stop the boats’ vs ‘Smash the Gangs’ (Prof Alex Balch)
58. The sleeping dog of ‘Europe: UK relations with the EU as a non-issue (Prof Simon Usherwood)
59. Labour: a very conservative housing manifesto (Prof Becky Tunstall)
60. Why the Labour Government must abolish the two-child benefit limit policy (Dr Yekaterina Chzhen)
61. Take the next right: mainstream parties’ positions on gender and LGBTQ+ equality issues (Dr Louise Luxton)
Where has the climate crisis been for the two main parties in the UK 2024 Election campaign?
Less evident than it was in 2019, when Channel 4 “empty-chaired” Boris Johnson with a melting block of ice, when he was a no-show for the televised leaders’ Climate Debate. This time, there have been no such debates; part of a larger picture of denial, minimisation and repression of our climactic futures from the two main parties (albeit to differing degrees). Sunak’s Conservatives, following their against-trend win in the Uxbridge by-election (July 2023), on an anti-ULEZ platform, ran misleading Facebook election ads claiming, “Labour’s national ULEZ: coming to a road near you this July”. Labour, meanwhile, cut pledged funds for its “Green Prosperity Plan” in half, concerned about “fiscally responsible” optics, given the UK economy was in recession in 2023.
For the first time, warming globally has exceeded 1.5 degrees above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average for a whole year, 2023-24. Yet, the public would hardly know that, in a sea of UK press headlines about “small boats”. YouGov’s “most important issues” tracker found that the cost of living (45%) and health (34%) were UK voters’ top priorities in 2024. Meanwhile, in the European Parliament elections this June, the number of seats held by Green parties fell compared to the last European election (2019) from 74 to 54 seats, with support particularly falling in Germany and France. By contrast, the far-right increased their vote share, finding fertile ground for anti-immigrant sentiment amidst the cost-of-living crisis.
A turn away from ecological sustainability is consistent (in a Western context) with Inglehart’s post-materialism thesis. The Silent Revolution (1977) discusses a shift in Western values in the Baby Boomer generation, due to a new post-WW2 material affluence, away from prioritising material needs towards an emphasis on quality of life (including the ecological). Conversely, evidence shows our present period is one of a decline in living standards. After the Greta Thunberg inspired School Strikes for Climate, pre-Covid, there has, arguably, in line with Inglehart’s thesis, been a shift back towards values focused on immediate material security. The UK election has followed that trend, with an increase in votes for the far-right; Reform won five seats on approx. four million votes. However, the Green Party also won four seats (up three from 2019) on approx. two million votes. Materialist and post-materialist values are evidently in circulation in the UK concurrently, amongst different constituencies.
Of course, climate stability, healthy ecologies and biodiversity are far from immaterial. However, as DeLay (2024) writes, our mainstream Western polity continues to remain significantly in “reality denial and guilt denial” on climate. Psychologists might cite the “ostrich problem”, where avoidance of self-monitoring enables the repression of psychological discomfort, otherwise strongly aroused by the evident cognitive dissonance between the trajectory towards planetary health we should be on, and the one we are on. Psychoanalyst Weintrobe (2021) argues that such processes of denial are connected to an omnipotent fantasy of self-sufficiency and exceptionalism, creating what Layton sees as “a perverse relation to reality”. This functions as emotional containment, and a Manic Defence against anxiety about “the failures in caretaking” that have accompanied growing economic inequalities in “an increasingly dangerous world”. The Manic Defence is characterised by a triumphantly scornful attitude deployed as a defence against feelings of helplessness and loss, and the paucity of “environmental conditions”.
The psychology of denial as a form of manic defence can also explain the contemptuous tone and almost visceral public hatred of climate activist group Just Stop Oil (JSO). Starmer has referred to them as “contemptible” and Sunak dubbed their Stonehenge action “disgraceful cultural vandalism”. However one views their strategies, JSO’s point is not difficult to grasp – you think our actions are shocking – just wait until you hear about the fossil fuel industry’s.
This election has seen both our main political parties in varying degrees of denial about the climate emergency we face, albeit there are clear differences. Sunak tried to make “net zero” a culture war issue and to frighten voters with the cost of energy transition, attracting condemnation even from a former Conservative energy minister. Global Witness referred to the Conservative party as “the political wing of the fossil fuel industry”. Labour, by contrast, has the manifesto ambition “make Britain a clean energy superpower”. Labour’s denial therefore lies in timidity, in not, as Friends of the Earth said, fully acknowledging “the scale of the challenge ahead”.
Perhaps our collective fear of the shambling spectre of the Goliath that is environmental degradation, reaching down to obliterate the world we knew, leads the majority as argued by Naomi Klein to deny the evidence of climate traducing “disaster capitalism” and to continue to hate David (JSO, Greta Thunberg) and his slingshot warnings instead.
